Trump Voters Live in a Bubble, Too

America has a big, fat sexism problem, and I'm not just talking about our boy president-in-waiting. And while it would be a stretch to lay the whole thing at the feet of Donald Trump, it's safe to say he wouldn't be here without it.

For devout Clintonites, sexism seemed the defining cause of her downfall. While opponents from both the right and left characterized her as too corrupt to win, one could argue torpedoing her with that particular missile, rather than the infinitely more compromised Trump, is itself evidence of sexism at work. But the problem, as a recent poll shows, is that many of us don't seem to be able to admit that sexism even exists in the first place. One reason for that may be related to another ongoing election narrative, a criticism directed at the left—and the media in particular—throughout this damnable year: that we live inside of a bubble, incapable of understanding what life is like for so-called Real Americans.

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It's pretty sexist out there in Real America, it turns out.

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According to a poll from the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem, it seems likely that sexism, combined with a significant percentage of voters' inability to empathize with the lives of others, played a large role in Trump's victory.

It's hard to fathom here, safely ensconced in the ivory tower of liberalism in which I do my juice cleanses, that a presidential candidate boasting about sexual assault resulted in zero consequences whatsoever, but if you ask those who voted for him, it's really not that big of a deal. Sixty-one percent of Americans overall said they were upset by the tape, yet 65 percent of Republican men found it to be much ado about nothing. What's a little pussy grab between acquaintances, right? Just ask Christopher von Keyserling, a Republican official in Connecticut, who was arrested this week for trying as much on a colleague and then claiming it was just a joke.

From the perspective of Trump voters, actions like this can be dismissed as a joke because they can't step outside the strongest bubble known to mankind—the force-field endowed by the existence of a penis—to consider what it might be like to be on the opposite end of sexism or sexual assault.

Many of us don't seem to be able to admit that sexism even exists in the first place.

But sexism is over, haven't you heard? According to the same Republican men, right now, today, in the year of our President Donald J. Trump, it is a better time to be a woman than a man. Never mind that 82 percent of female respondents said sexism is a problem. Equality is here, said 43 percent of Trump men, 47 percent of whom also claimed sexism isn't even a thing anymore, especially because there are the same number of men and women in Congress. Of course, that last fact is a lie—women make up only 19 percent of Congress—but 32 percent of Trump men say the playing field is level for our elected officials.

There's more. According to the poll, 54 percent of women said they had been touched inappropriately without consent, but only 31 percent of men suspected that their wives or girlfriends had been. Thirty percent of Trump voters either weren't sure whether the type of conduct Trump bragged about was sexual assault, or said definitively that it wasn't. If you think that's not a problem, consider the Brooklyn NYPD commander who earlier this month dismissed the idea that date rape or rape by acquaintances is worth the time to investigate, because it's not a "true stranger rape" where "a random guy picks up a stranger off the street. Those, he said, "are the troubling ones."

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An endless tide of reductive, folksy "Meet the Trump Voter!" pieces has made much of an unmooring identity disruption that led to a reactionary digging in of heels. The stereotypical Trump voter, we've been told, has seen the country changing at a rate they're uncomfortable with, and they hope to return to an earlier time—the America that was once great. What that really means is an America where white men felt like the default citizen. Trump masterfully played upon these fears. It's why Americans believe there are 54 million Muslims in the country when the number is closer to 3 million, or why so many will deny that sexism even exists. As the PerryUndem poll shows, and as any time spent online in the past year will affirm, the "identity politics" of women, as well as LGBT and minority groups, were successfully recast as special interests rather than basic human rights. A certain segment of the population heard in Trump's message what they were waiting for all along: That they are the victim.

The bubble is thick. But it can be burst. "When you're accustomed to privilege," as the famous quote goes, "equality feels like oppression."

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